Crowded New Jersey House Democratic Primary Too Close to Call

A progressive political organizer and a former congressman were locked in a tight Democratic primary Thursday for a vacant New Jersey congressional district.

Analilia Mejia, a top official on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, had 29% of the vote compared with 28% for Tom Malinowski, a former House member and the favorite to win the 11-candidate race.

Election analysis website Decision Desk HQ projected Malinowski as the winner, then retracted its projection after Mejia’s strong showing among election-day voters erased Malinowski’s advantage among early and mail-in votes.

Mejia’s campaign posted on X a November 1948 photograph of President Harry Truman holding up a Chicago Tribune newspaper with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman,” a reference to the publication’s erroneous projection that Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey won the election.

The winner will head to an April 16 special election to complete the unexpired term won by now-Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D), who resigned last November. Republican nominee Joe Hathaway, the mayor of Randolph in Morris County, was unopposed in his primary.

The 11th District is a Democratic-leaning swath of well-educated and upper-income suburbs in parts of Morris, Essex, and Passaic Counties.

Mejia’s backers included Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the progressive Working Families Party, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, which represents a large bloc of liberal Democrats.

“I am going to be fighting to unrig our economy and to protect our democracy,” Mejia said at a candidate forum. “The biggest problem we have is the outsized power of money in our democracy.”

Mejia called for abolishing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Malinowski, 60, represented an adjacent House district for two terms, losing in 2022 to Tom Kean Jr. (R) in part because of unfavorable redistricting. Two municipalities Malinowski formerly represented, Millburn and Dover, are in the 11th District.

During the truncated special-primary campaign, Malinowski promoted his House service and said he was the first swing-district Democrat to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment. His platform includes repealing Trump’s emergency powers to impose tariffs, reinstating renewable energy tax credits, conducting oversight of Trump’s foreign policy, regulating social-media companies, and safeguarding the development of artificial intelligence.

Returning to Congress from the 11th District “would enable me to get back into the fight quickly, with my experience and some of my House seniority intact,” he said in an interview during the campaign.

Malinowski led the Democratic field in fundraising, with a donor list that included former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). He overcame more than $2.3 million in opposition spending by the United Democracy Project super-PAC funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which attacked Malinowski for supporting a bipartisan 2019 border funding bill.

Born in Communist Poland in 1965, Malinowski came to the US at age six with his mother. He worked on the staff of then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and the State Department and was a senior director of President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. During President Barack Obama’s second term, he was assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights, and labor.

New Jersey’s 11th District accounts for one of three vacancies in the House, where Republicans have a 218-214 majority. There are two vacant GOP seats, one in northwestern Georgia and one in northern California.